An Autobiography

Perfect- A Search

The Boyfriend and I are currently house hunting. Which you would think would be easy… Or at least only slightly difficult, but we have discovered that house hunting is incredibly, explicitly hard. Not because we can’t find anything we like, and not because we can’t find anything in our price range of very very low. Not even because both of our credit ratings suck (although it doesn’t help).

Our house hunt is harder than a pornstar’s dick…

Because of me.

I am at fault. I am the problem. I am willingly able to admit that, if not for my standards higher than the empire state building, we would probably be happily settled in a cozy little ranch house by now, my feet on his lap as he watches football and I read a book, the dogs curled up on the hearth and the cats knocking shit off the counters in the kitchen.

Instead, we are going to look at our twenty-seventh house tomorrow while I cross my fingers for something that doesn’t exist and he hopes I’ll just give up on trying to find something Better and we can put a down payment on the property he loves before someone else buys it.

The reason behind my difficulty does not lie in my controlling tendencies (okay, maybe just a little) or my perfectionism (who am I kidding? Of course it does) but rather in the fact that I have four horses. Four big horses. Four big, expensive show horses. Who need specific proper care and a specific type of landscape and a specific kind of neighbors and a specific speed limit on the road nearby. And okay, yes, I am a control freak who specializes in perfectionism and suffers diagnosed anxiety. As The Boyfriend asked the other day- what is really the harm in having a pasture that’s completely flat? Is it really going to kill my horses if they don’t have a hill to run up and down?

He tries to show me that I’m being silly, demanding a certain topography (gently rolling), but that’s what’s best for the stifles, and Lucky already has stifle issues, so she definitely cannot be on flat ground constantly, and there isn’t a stinking hill for twenty miles around the damn place.

So he told me we would build a hill. He’s too good for me, and he has no idea what he’s getting himself into. Poor man.

Of course, as soon as he thinks he has solved one problem, I give him another- it’s too small (I have my eye set on a solid fifteen acres), it’s too wet (although he says he thinks that’s because the current occupants have been doing doughnuts with their fourwheeler in the middle of the pasture), there’s no place for me to ride (taking away any of the already too small pasture area isn’t going to fly, and there aren’t trails or woods or maintained fields for another twenty miles around. And the speed limit on the road is 55, so I won’t be going on a leisurely walk down the street to benefit bone structure any time soon), and my largest and most insane point against the property is that the neighbors look like the whitest trashiest creepiest gun toting rednecks around. I swear to you, half a mile down the street, there’s a white trash militia. Complete with seven different Do Not Enter signs and a gate rusted to hell. The Boyfriend asks if I’ve met any of them (and also claims that our two shotguns and two pistols and four dogs will do a wonderful job of guarding the property) but my main job is selling horses and I can’t do that when Billy Bob and Gus have rusted out garbage in the yard on either side of us. Nor can I do it when every person for twenty miles has trash in their front yard. Wanna buy a thirty thousand dollar horse? Just pretend you don’t suspect him of having fucking tetanus from chewing on the bucket of rust our dear neighbor won’t get off our property line. There isn’t a damn grocery store for eighteen miles. There isn’t anything for eighteen miles. The entire town consists of one gas station, three auto shops, Dawg’s Diner Bar (I am not kidding), and a hillbilly car racetrack. And a Beagle dog club for some reason- I can’t figure that one out.

I can only imagine the state of the streets after a heavy snowfall- neither of us will be able to get to our jobs, not to mention that damn it, I wanted the kind of neighbors that I could borrow a cup of milk from without getting shanked. I come from small town farming country. I don’t desire to move to redneck heaven.